With the leaves starting to turn color on the Redmond Washington Microsoft Campus the world’s technical journalist have gathered at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center to hear from the Windows Server team about the long awaited rollout of Server 2008 previously called LongHorn. With the keynote talk by Bill Laing we got to hear about the timeline for the Windows Server family that stretches from the recently With the leaves starting to turn color on the Redmond Washington Microsoft Campus the world’s technical journalist have gathered at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center to hear from the Windows Server team about the long awaited rollout of Server 2008 previously called LongHorn.With the keynote talk by Bill Laing we got to hear about the timeline for the Windows Server family that stretches from the recently released Windows Home Server, to near future SMB versions, to new Clustering wizards, virtualization, and storage clustering. Officially named Windows Server 2008 by William “Bill” Gates at the WinHEC conference, Server 2008 promises increased flexibility for the IT professional. A key feature is that the Windows Server 2008 core is much slimmed down with the server role wizard adding in only the code you actually need. The Dog and Pony show has had folks from the Hillsboro School District, CA Quest Software, and Microsoft’s own IT department all talking about how Microsoft has solved their IT needs and how key features like Virtualization in Server 2008 will continue to meet their computing needs in the coming years. One harbinger of things to come was Bill Laing’s expected announcement that this will be the last Windows Server version with both a 32bit and 64bit release. It was expected since Exchange has already taken the plunge with other key server products soon to follow. One piece of good news is that future virtualization plans seem to include continued support for Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtual disks (VHD: Virtual Hard disk) punctuated with Mr. Laing also talking about a push for VHD’s to follow an open standard. I’ll be reporting on other presentations and this hoopla rolls along with hopes of being able to post some tasty power point slides once the Microsoft folks release them. I’ll also be cobbling together a report on future changes in Unified Communications (aka Microsoft Office Communication Server) and how Microsoft will be affecting the enterprise mobile phone of the very near future. Technology Industry